After the Crash

Geography, motive, communications intercepts, and all manner of circumstantial evidence suggest that the likeliest suspect in the horrific deaths of two hundred and ninety-eight people aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was the curiously well-armed and well-coördinated military outfit loyal to Moscow in eastern Ukraine. Various government and intelligence officials in Kiev say that they have evidence, including a series of damning tapped conversations among pro-Russian forces, that the separatists shot down the plane, which crashed near Grabovo, a coal-mining town in the Donetsk region.

Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko, said, “We are calling this not an incident, not a catastrophe, but a terrorist act.” U.S. intelligence officials have told the Times and other media outlets that whoever was behind the destruction of the airliner, which was flying at more than thirty thousand feet, bound to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, likely fired a sophisticated Russian-made surface-to-air missile that was either snatched from the Ukrainian Army or supplied by the Russians.

But let’s stop here and register the proper cautions and caveats: There has been no investigation, no conclusive proof. (And there won’t necessarily be a proper and convincing investigation, either, considering the deliberately chaotic and militarized state of eastern Ukraine these days, and Russia’s clear interests.) We shouldn’t pretend to know for certain what we don’t.

What’s far more certain is that Vladimir Putin, acting out of resentment and fury toward the West and the leaders in Kiev, has fanned a kind of prolonged political frenzy, both in Russia and among his confederates in Ukraine, that serves his immediate political needs but that he can no longer easily calibrate and control. Putin’s defiant annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine inflated his popularity at home. Despite a flaccid economy, his approval rating approaches levels rarely seen beyond North Korea. But the tactically clever and deeply cynical maneuvers of propaganda and military improvisation that have taken him this far, one of his former advisers told me in Moscow earlier this month, are bound to risk unanticipated disasters. Western economic and political sanctions may be the least of it.

The former adviser, Gleb Pavlovsky, is one of the most enigmatic political actors in Moscow. Born in Odessa, he was arrested in 1982, when he was thirty-one, for illegally distributing dissident literature. He marred his reputation in dissident circles, however, when he confessed to his “crimes” and spared himself a long term in the gulag at hard labor. Instead, he was sentenced to internal exile for a couple of years in the northern provinces, where he worked as a painter and stoker.

In the Gorbachev years, Pavlovsky was the editor-in-chief of the liberal magazine Twentieth Century and the World, and after the fall of the Soviet Union he refashioned himself as a “political technologist.” For both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, he was a highly influential and darkly skillful spin doctor, a political P.R. man. Putin finally severed his relations with Pavlovsky, in 2011, but not before Pavlovsky acquired an insider’s view of a Kremlin dominated by Putin and the siloviki, members of the security forces.

When I met Pavlovsky in Moscow a couple of weeks ago, he seemed especially concerned about the lack of strategic thinking by Putin, and about the consequences of the feverish anti-Ukrainian, anti-American, and generally xenophobic programming on state television, from which nearly all Russians derive their news and their sense of what is going on in the world.

Putin’s incursion into Crimea and his manipulation of the situation in eastern Ukraine, Pavlovsky said, “was an improvisation, though the logistics and plans existed a long time ago.”

Since returning to the Presidency, Pavlovsky said, Putin has “created an artificial situation in which a ‘pathological minority’—the protesters on Bolotnaya Square [two years ago], then Pussy Riot, then the liberal ‘pedophiles’—is held up in contrast to a ‘healthy majority.’ Every time this happens, his ratings go up.” The nightly television broadcasts from Ukraine, so full of wild exaggeration about Ukrainian “fascists” and mass carnage, are a Kremlin-produced “spectacle,” he said, expertly crafted by the heads of the main state networks.

“Now this has become a problem for Putin, because this system cannot be wholly managed,” Pavlovsky said. The news programs have “overheated” public opinion and the collective political imagination.

“How can Putin really manage this?” Pavlovsky went on. “You’d need to be an amazing conductor. Stalin was an amazing conductor in this way. Putin can’t quite pull off this trick. The audience is warmed up and ready to go; it is wound up and waiting for more and more conflict. You can’t just say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s a dangerous moment. Today, forty per cent of Russia wants real war with Ukraine. Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.”

Pavlovsky was especially concerned about one of the pro-Russian military leaders in eastern Ukraine, a former (and possibly current) Russian intelligence officer known to most by his nom de guerre, Igor Strelkov. (Strelkov’s real name is Igor Girkin.)

A wildly messianic nationalist who cultivates an air of lumpy intrigue, Strelkov has found his way to the battlefields of Chechnya, Serbia, and Transnistria. He is now helping to run the separatist operation in Donetsk. Like the radical nationalists and neo-imperialists in Moscow, who have easy access to the airwaves these days, Strelkov has a singular point of disagreement with Putin: the Russian President hasn’t gone nearly far enough; he has failed to invade and annex “Novorossiya,” the separatist term for eastern Ukraine. Pavlovsky said that people like Strelkov and his Moscow allies are as delusional as they are dangerous, somehow believing that they are taking part in grand historical dramas, like the Battle of Borodino, in 1812, or “the novels of Tolkien.”

“Strelkov is well known for leading historical reënactments of Russian military battles, like you have in the States with the Civil War reënactors,” Pavlovsky said. “It used to be a fantasy world for people like him, but now they have a realm for their imaginations.”

If it turns out that men like Strelkov and his fellow soldier-fantasists were responsible for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and all the people on board, the fever in Russia and Ukraine may intensify beyond anything that Vladimir Putin could have predicted or desired. It is long past time that Putin ended both the inflammatory information war in Russia and the military proxy war in eastern Ukraine that he has done so much to conceive, fund, organize, and fuel. There are hundreds of corpses strewn across a field today in eastern Ukraine. What is Vladimir Putin’s next move?

Photograph: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty

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